The One You Feed - How to Begin Your Journey to Wholeness with Parker Palmer

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Parker J. Palmer, is the founder and Senior Partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal. He is a world-renowned writer, speaker and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He has reached millions worldwide through his nine books, including Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, and Healing the Heart of Democracy. But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Parker Palmer and I Discuss and … His book, Hidden Wholeness: A Journey Towards an Undivided Life What the idea of “the Soul” means to him His experiences with depression and the lesson he’s learned from it What “the divided life” is The importance of having both community and solitude The idea of “The Circle of Trust” The importance of letting another person work their way to the answer themselves His book, Healing the Heart of Democracy The important role that conflict brings to our form of government The Five Habits of the Heart Eustress is the positive effect of tension The two ways that the heart can break How those with different viewpoints can find common ground The Courage and Renewal Center Parker Palmer Links Parker’s Website Twitter Facebook By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Parker Palmer, check out these other episodes: The Divided Yet Connected Brain with Iain McGilchrist Jonathan RauchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us, or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize that we have years and years of incredible episodes in our archives. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites. It might be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Parker Palmer. We have multiple voices within us, and it's not always clear, even when we're not in a state of depression, that we're listening to true self. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.

Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Parker Palmer, an author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality, and social change. Parker is the founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. He's also the author of many books, including A Hidden Wholeness,

The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. This episode is brought to you by Casper Mattresses. Go to casper.com slash wolf and use the promo code wolf to save $50 off your first purchase. And here's the interview with Parker Palmer. Hi, Parker. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Rick. Good to be with you. I'm happy to have you on. I've had a chance to explore some of your work, particularly in depth over the last

week. And I think there's a lot that really spoke to me about it. And I look forward to getting into some of those details. Before we do that, though, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather quietly replies, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you may know, paradox is a big word in my vocabulary, and we'll probably return to it.

On the one hand, I agree completely that we have these contrary forces inside of us, the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and a lot depends on which one we feed. and a lot depends on which one we feed. When I first read that parable years ago, I thought of Abraham Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature. And, of course, in doing so, he was also implying that we have lesser angels in there as well. So on that level, I'm 100% with the parable. On another level, I wrestle with the implications a little bit in the sense that I think that in the long run, human wholeness has a lot to do with integrating the light and the dark in us, rather than trying to overwhelm one with the other,

rather than trying to imagine that it's possible to drive out the darkness. It seems to me that we always live with our shadows, partly because they're the hardest things for us to see in ourselves. We can see the shadow in another person quite easily. Oh, he or she is greedy or resentful or angry or whatever, but we have a harder time seeing that in ourselves. I once defined wholeness as, in this way, wholeness is not perfection. Wholeness is about embracing all of what we are and acknowledging that our darkness is as important as our light and sort of holding that in our conscious awareness as we go through the day so that we can kind of manage our lives in that complicated force field. So like most stories or parables or metaphors,

that one sort of opens up a whole raft of questions for me that I find very fruitful. Yep, I agree. I think it's, on the surface, it's very straightforward. You kind of get it, and it's about choice. But as you go further into it, there really are these things about how do we work with those bad wolf part of ourselves? You know, I think it's like as a parable, it just, at a certain point, you're like, well, it's not a literal story. So you, you can't take it that way. But the show has really spent a lot of time, I think, exploring how we work with, with both parts of that. And you've got a number of books. I spent time mainly with two of them. And we'll start with

the first one that I read, which is called Hidden Wholeness, The Journey Towards an Undivided Life. And this really gets to kind of what you were just talking about in the integration of the wolves. Now, I have to say that anybody that starts a book with a Leonard Cohen quote is always going to be a favorite of mine. And you start the book by quoting a line of his from the song The Future. It says, The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold, and it has overturned the order of the soul. And what I'd like to start talking about is this idea of the soul.

It comes up a lot in your writing, and I was wondering if you could explain what that means to you. Well, I'll take my best shot. I hesitate a bit because I think ultimately soul is a word that points toward a mystery, which we know by many names and for which no one has the right name. The closest I've ever been able to come to what I might mean by soul is the being and human being. But other traditions name it in other ways. Secular humanists call it identity and integrity. Buddhists call it big self. Thomas Merton called it true self. The Hasidic Jews call it the spark of the divine in every being. I've always said that it doesn't matter to me what you call it, since no

one knows its true name. And fighting over the name seems utterly nonsensical to me. But it does matter to me that you call it something, because if you don't have a name for it by way of acknowledging its existence, its reality, then it seems to me we end up treating ourselves and each other as objects to be manipulated or manufactured into whatever shape the culture wants us to take, or empty vessels to be filled with other people's knowledge and, quote, wisdom and guidance. So I think the naming of this mystery within the human self is a way of making a deep bow to every person, because every person has this thing called soul, whatever it may be. I think for me, the discovery of soul happened under extremely stressful, difficult, dark circumstances, namely my own journey into clinical depression three times in my adult life.

And whenever you'd like, I'd be glad to talk more about that. We don't mention depression on this show. Never, I'm sure. Since you're talking about human experience, I'm sure you never do. I'm a fellow sufferer, and it comes up often. How long ago was your last, you know, major episode? And I'd be curious how much of it sort of happens at a more minor level for you when you're not in the middle of a major episode? Is it kind of an on-off switch or is there a gradient there for

you? Well, I think like most of us, I, you know, I swing through a certain range of moods day by day, like weather moving through. But as all of us who have experienced clinical depression know, it's not at all like being sad or feeling bad. In fact, one of the features of depression that's so terrifying is you really can't feel anything. Your emotions are gone. So my most recent experience was 12 years ago when I was 65 years old. My two prior experiences were in my 40s, my early 40s and then my late 40s. So the one at age 65, I'm now 77. The one at age 65 took me by surprise. But what I, what I, I mean, the pearl of great price in these very long, months long journeys underground, I used to say depression is like

being lost in the dark, but I eventually refined that to say depression is like becoming the dark which is quite a different thing right um you know when when you're in depression you don't have that capacity to take the balcony view of yourself and and say oh i see what's going on with me, as we can when we're angry or having other sort of normal range emotions. And once we can get in the balcony and get a look at ourselves, we can often find a way out. But when you become the darkness, you don't have any outside view of it. You don't have any leverage on it.

What I discovered in depression, and of course, some of this is in the aftermath or on your way out, I discovered that the faculties that I normally depend on were dead and gone. And there are four of them that I at least depend on with some regularity. One is my intellect, another is my ego, another is my emotions, and another is my will. Well, in depression, you can't think your way out of it, so the intellect is useless. Your ego is shattered. You have no sense of self, so that doesn't work either. Your emotions, as I've said, are dead and gone. You can't feel anything. And your willpower is limited to the tiniest, tiniest steps, like getting up at 11 o'clock instead of 1130, being able to

face the day just a little earlier. And it was under those circumstances that I began to sense from time to time that there was this little tiny spark of life way back in the thickets of the dark forest that my life had become that wanted me to stay alive. a wild animal, which is, you know, very, very wily and can tough and can survive where there's little to eat and little encouragement, but like the wild animal is also very, very shy. And I became very interested under those circumstances in what it might be like to create conditions where the soul or whatever you want to call it could put in a more regular appearance than it does in normal everyday society where we create so many conditions that drive the shy soul back into hiding. As I like to say, we all know that if we want to see a wild animal out in the woods, the last thing we want to do is to go through the woods shouting for it to come out. What we want instead is to sit quietly at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, What we want instead is to sit quietly at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth.

And after a while, the thing we're seeking may put in an appearance. We may catch it only out of the corner of our eye. But once you've seen it, you won't forget it. And that was the image that came to me as I emerged from the depths of depression. I love that analogy about the wild animal. And we'll come back to what are some of the ways that you've worked to create of potentially, you know, drawing the soul out. You say that, I'm just going to quote you here, that you said, the divided life is a wounded life and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound.

Ignore that call. And we find ourselves trying to numb our pain with an anesthetic of our choice, be it substance abuse, overwork, consumerism, or mindless media noise. Such anesthetics are easy to come by in a society that wants to keep us divided and unaware of our pain. So from your perspective, is the divided life, was that behind what's

happening in a depression sense for you? I think so. I mean, when I talk about depression, as I think you know, Eric, I'm always eager to say that depression comes in many forms. And those who specialize in studying and trying to treat depression are the first to say that there's a lot of mystery surrounding the what's and whys of depression. So I'm reluctant to make huge generalizations as if they apply to everybody. Some depressions are strictly genetic or related to brain chemistry, I think, and others are highly, highly situational. And then what gets really confusing is that no matter which end of the spectrum you start at, the two can intermingle.

So if you start with a situational depression or something in your life where you're living a divided life and something is troubling you so deeply that you're losing sleep and you develop radical insomnia, that can change your brain chemistry in a way that creates depression. On the other hand, you can't tweeze those things apart. Exactly. And if you start with a genetically based depression that distorts your perceptions and your behavior, then you're going to end up in situations that worsen it. So it's a tricky thing to unravel. I think there is in my background, my family background, some genetic predisposition toward depression. And I think that in my case, the balance of factors were more situational than genetic or biochemical. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the things that I have discovered as we've done this show, when I think about personal development or this whole area of the soul of spirituality, there's so much thought and writing

and literature on that need to go within, the need to understand our thoughts, to meditate. And as I've done this show, certainly we've talked a lot about that. But I've been surprised by how often we've talked about, you know, people have brought us back to the importance of other people. And one of the things that I found most profound in your writing was the way that you very over and over drive home this idea that it's not an either or thing that we really need in order to nurture the soul we really need both the community and solitude can

you explain a little bit more why both those things are so critical that's a very important point certainly to me and i'm glad it is to you and apparently to other guests on your show. You know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a great German theologian who took a stand against Hitler and was executed just before the end of the war. He wrote a wonderful book called Life Together and the life he lived kind of gives him a lot of street cred in my mind in what he said and one of the great sentences in that book is this let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone and let the person who cannot be alone beware of being in community. And I think that behind that is this very important paradox that we need to, first of all, well, you could start in either place,

but I'm going to start first with the inner journey and with listening to the voice of true self or the voice of the soul. I'm a Quaker, and as we Quakers would say, the voice of the inner teacher. That's obviously critical. But as you know, and I know, and anyone who's suffered from depression knows, there's something called the voice of depression that speaks lies about who we are. It tells us that we're worthless. It tells us today is the day to take your life because there's no hope left. And if you journey with depression, you have to fight that voice

off with some regularity. In other words, we have multiple voices within us, and it's not always clear, even when we're not in a state of depression, that we're listening to true self. Perhaps we're listening to a voice of resentment, or of hurt, or of greed, or of simple anger. So it's important to have a community in which to test, to sift and winnow what it is you're hearing from within. And I don't mean a community that listens to what you have to say and then tells you you're right or you're wrong or you're half right and half wrong. That doesn't work. I'm talking about a community of discernment where we have a chance to speak our truth, whatever we may think it is, into the

center of the circle or into the space between us in a relationship and be deeply listened to by the other person. And get the gift from the other person of honest, open questions. One of the ground rules in the work I do, which I know we'll be talking about a little later, is no fixing, no saving, no advising, and no correcting each other. This is what creates safe space for the soul. And if you think about those four words, correcting, advising, saving, and fixing, if you think about those four words, correcting, fixing, advising, and saving each other, those are the things that we mostly do when we listen to other people. Somebody comes to us with a problem, and we may listen for a few minutes, maybe a little longer if we've recently been to a listening workshop. And then we'll say, well, you know, I read this great book on that subject. Why don't you go read it?

I'm sure it would do you a lot of good. Or there's some exercises you can do or a diet you ought to go on, etc. Instead, we learn in the work I do to ask each other honest pause and wonder, is that the voice of true self I've been listening to or is it something else? An honest open question which serves no purpose except to enable us to have a deeper conversation with ourselves, and which can only come in community, whether that's a community of two people or 10 people or 50 people. That's the kind of inquiry that constitutes communal discernment of the sort I'm talking about that can help us sort out the wheat from the chaff in our own internal dialogue. To me, this is a very important principle and it explains why Bonhoeffer said, if you

can't be in community, watch out about being alone and if you can't be alone, watch out about being in community. When you look at the second half of that, if you can't be alone, beware of being in community. When you look at the second half of that, if you can't be alone, beware of being in community. Aloneness is one of the conditions under which we come home to ourselves and we can show up in community as who we really are. As Thomas Merton used a great phrase, he said, most of us live lives of self-impersonation. So we can show up in community as who we really are rather than as self-impersonators. So I'm fascinated with this paradox of solitude and community and with how it is that we take our discernment of our own truth in solitude and community,

how it is we take that into the larger world of social and political action, or simply of neighborly concern. There's so much in what you said there. The first is the process you're describing is something that you call a circle of trust. And your book, The Hidden Wholeness, really explores that in great, great detail. And I would encourage people to definitely check that out. We'll have a download on our site at oneufeed.net slash Parker, that will have some of that and we'll have links to your site and all the great things that are available out on your site. I wanted to explore a couple ideas within the circle of trust that I thought was interesting because this idea of, you know, we're not going to advise other people, we're not going to fix them. As I was listening to you, I was thinking, well, in some cases,

that's exactly what we're asking for and what we want. Like if I come to someone and say, hey, I coach people who come to me and say, hey, I can't seem to, I can't seem to get a daily exercise practice going right in a situation like that, you know, very concrete advice can be really useful. But what you're talking about is really going into that deeper level of discovering who we are, to reaching our soul. And you talk a lot about the thing that I think is so important in what you're saying there is that that answer is only going to come from ourselves. You know, it's that idea of having an inner teacher and that the circle of trust in these methods you talk about are really there to get us in touch with our own inner teacher. And that's why it needs the quiet and the respect and the safety of that circle of trust. Absolutely. Of course, there are circumstances when some sort of advice is both wanted and helpful. I do think that sometimes that we have a tendency generally to give advice, whether it's wanted or helpful or not, partly because in everyday life,

giving it gets us off the hook. You know, you come to me with your problem. I'm kind of mentally looking at my watch and thinking, I've got a busy day ahead of me and a lot of things to do. If I can give Eric a piece of advice about this, I can kind of wash my hands of any further responsibility for him. Because if he takes my advice, he'll be fine. And if he doesn't, that's his problem, not mine, right? So advice giving can be a form of brush off. And one of the big dangers about the frequency with which we give advice is the fact that it's kind of like giving CPR to people who actually can breathe for themselves. And when we give them CPR, then we're actually inhibiting their own capacity to breathe.

There are people who need CPR because they can't breathe. But when we're giving it in inappropriate circumstances, it's not helpful. And I think the other thing to always remember about our advice, and I'm sure that this is something you think about a lot as a coach, is that a person may ask for advice, but if there is not a readiness within that person to receive it and let it sink in and then implement it, the advice is not going to help. That's right. And so anything we can do to let the answers to that person's problem arise from within that person, I think then the greater service we're being to that individual. Yeah, there's no doubt that when people can work their way to the answer themselves, they're much more likely to buy in and do it. And I just, I really like the circle of trust idea. And I would, if we had more time, I would like to really

go deeper into it. But I know for me, it's one of those things I'm going to keep spending some time on and look at. And I've looked at a couple of the retreats that you do. And so I may go to one of those because I think of myself as somebody who listens well, but, but your book and the way that you approach this is very different than most of what we're taught. And it, it resonates as, as very true. And I thought that part where you talked about the fixing and advising others is a way to get ourselves off the hook is a, is a really profound idea that I had never thought of before. off the hook is a really profound idea that I had never thought of before. Yeah. I'm quite sure that professional coaches and counselors don't do that, but I think in ordinary everyday life, we do a fair amount of that. And it's a good cautionary idea

to keep in mind. You know, a classic case would be a parent with a child who's just come home from a hairy day at work and looking forward to a relaxing evening, and here comes your teenager with a terrible, terrible problem. Well, there's an inevitable human tendency to just want to get this exchange over with as quickly as possible. And so I think we all recognize that. We need to cut ourselves some slack about that. I'm a great believer in self-forgiveness because I've screwed up so often. That is the advantage of screwing up as often as I have, and it sounds like you have.

You have to get good at self-forgiveness and forgiving others. Yep. And you've got to make all of life a learning journey, or as Gandhi said, experiments with truth. And then you have to learn from the failed experiments. One of the things that I wanted to go deeper into is, I want to move from your book on the hidden wholeness and go to healing the heart of democracy. Although I find a great deal of commonality between, I find a lot of the concepts carry over in those books. But obviously, when you wrote that book, we weren't in the middle of the election circus we're in now. Is anything that you wrote in there, do you feel any different, or anything that you would add to that book after kind of what we've been watching this year?

Yes and no. And as I'll say in a minute, in fact, I have been sort of, in a way, adding pages to that book with some things I've recently written and published. It seems to me that the fundamental principles I laid out in that book are still very sound. And one of the things that's happening right now is something that's happened for a very long time in our American political discourse, but now it's happening on steroids. And what I'm referring

to is this, that as I say in the book, when Americans talk about politics, and this has been true for many, many years, that we almost always talk about them, about those people in Washington, D.C., or in the state capital, who are either screwing everything up or, on occasion, whom we regard as heroes for taking the right stand. But whatever it is, we're always talking about people who aren't in the room. And when I talk to audiences about this, I say, you know, when was the last time in your personal life or in your work situation or in your congregation or neighborhood, when was the last time that talking about someone who isn't there has solved any problem? As we all know, it doesn't. In fact, it's better classified as gossip than

as political discourse or as just letting off steam. And we all understand it on that level. But my belief is that in a country founded on the fundamental premise that this is all about we the people, that this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We the people need to get our act together. And what that means is learning to talk across the lines that divide us on a local level. Not to talk about them, but to talk with each other. And to do that across lines of division in a way that would at least give us a fighting chance to come to a rough consensus on a few items of the common good so that we can articulate that common good to people in power and hold them accountable to it more effectively. I'll put this in slightly different terms. We have succumbed for a long time to the divide and conquer tactic that is often used in American politics by people who wish to seize power at high levels of political office. And, you know, they're very, very good at that.

And our media play along with it in ways that divide us artificially, it seems to me, that, you know, if you read the screaming headlines in the newspaper or the streaming headlines on CNN or that flow across your computer screen, you know, you would think that the people who live up and down my block and the people who live up and down your block are at each other's throats most of the time. But that's not true. There is, when you drill down to the local level, to the level of we the people, there is a surprising amount of consensus. And I can tell micro stories or macro stories about that. since those tend to be more impressive to people who are cynics or who have given up on a constitutional amendment to overcome the Supreme Court decisions called Citizens United, which gave big money extraordinary overweening power in our political process. Most people who have looked at American politics have said the game is lost. Once the

Supreme Court established the Citizens United laws, it was no longer possible for ordinary people to get their voices heard in the American political process. But 16 states have now called for a constitutional amendment, and another 16 have such calls in the pipeline. And that's moving in on the two-thirds necessary among the states to eventually pass that constitutional amendment in the Congress. Now, we're a long way from passing a constitutional amendment. That's not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is very simple. The calls that I'm talking about, which have either happened or are in the pipeline, would never have happened if there had not been a broad conversation and a broad coalition across the political spectrum, left, center,

and right, of people who, despite the fact that they range from progressive Democrats to members of the Tea Party, are in agreement that crony capitalism is a bad thing. That it's a bad thing, capitalism is a bad thing. That it's a bad thing, whether you're left, right, or center, to have a Congress that is essentially bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations and other folks who have benefited from Citizens United. So is that conversation possible? You bet it is. And one of the best macro examples is the one I just gave. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like...

Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Oh, That's the opening? Really, no really. Oh, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What I found really interesting about that section of your book was we tend to think of the divide in the political spectrum between right and left. You know, that tends to be where we draw up our lines and think that that's really where we're divided in. You said that a more useful, maybe useful isn't the right word, but a different division to find at least patches of common ground. Because we begin by sharing the sense that we are part of we the people. And we have a voice that wants to be heard. And we have agency, the capacity to translate that voice into effective action. All that remains is for us to find those substantive issues on which we agree. And there are lots of them, left, right, and center, in poll after poll, and in action project after action project, have found consensus not only around crony capitalism, but around the reform of our drug laws, around prison reform, around meaningful, reasonable forms of gun control, etc., etc., etc.

All of these things that if you simply read the headlines, you would imagine we're totally polarized on when in fact we're not. But the other thing, the other point that I make in the book, and as you know, Eric, and this is an important point to me, is that all the founders of this country really got it wrong about who constitutes we the people. You know, for them, it didn't involve women. It didn't involve enslaved human beings. It didn't involve Native Americans. It didn't involve white men who didn't own land.

We the people was people who looked like them, like the founders, white male gentry, landowners. And they essentially wanted a country that was governed by that kind of elite. Well, they got that terribly wrong and they planted DNA in this American experiment in democracy that we are, you know, that is still bearing bad fruit today and will for a long time to come. It's called racism, it's called sexism, and so forth and so on. And candidates, certain candidates, Mr. Trump being the most notable example at the moment, are playing on all of that in a really demonic way. We can talk about that in a little bit if you'd like. But the founders, despite the fact that they blew it when it comes to who's included in we the people, had a particular form of political genius which

we cannot forget. And that is that they crafted the first form of government that I'm aware of anyway, in which conflict, even intense conflict, even intense conflict, is regarded not as the enemy of a good social order, but as the engine of a better social order. That's why we have the structure of government that we do, which in the book I liken to a weaver's loom holding the tension of threads on which the fabric of a good society can keep getting woven and rewoven. The historian Joseph Ellis has written eloquently about the fact that our form of government was not intended to come to quick solutions to problems. Instead, it was intended to keep the salient problems on the table long enough that in holding their tension, we could open our minds and hearts

to better and better solutions, a more perfect union, to use the language of the founders. So it's that structure of government that over the years has allowed us to expand the language of the founders. So it's that structure of government that over the years has allowed us to expand the definition of we the people way beyond what the founders imagined, and much for the better, especially in a society that by 2050 is going to be over half people of color. You have five habits of the heart that you describe that are important to heal the heart of democracy. And we're not going to have time to go through all of them. But I wanted to circle back to one that you reference there, which is an ability to hold tension in life-giving ways. Can you explore what that means a little bit more? We have this primitive brain stem, the lizard brain I guess some people call it,

that has these instinctive behaviors, the most famous of which is the fight or flight response. So that when we're hit with the tension of a sudden stimulus, our tendency is either to turn around and punch it out or to flee from it in fear. So we don't like tension. We either run away or try to kill it off. And there's evidence after evidence of how difficult it is for us to hold tension at all, let alone to hold it creatively.

One of the studies that fascinates me as someone who has a deep belief in the power and the necessity of silence to do any kind of meaningful discernment. There have been studies that show that the average group can tolerate about 15 seconds of silence before somebody has to break it, because suddenly people are experiencing the tension of thinking something has gone wrong. This is getting awkward. And in our groups where we practice silence in these circles of trust and learn its value, we like to say to people, silence isn't a sign that something is going wrong it it may be a sign that something is going really really right as people reflect deeply on what they've been hearing and try to

integrate it into their own lives so there are a lot of examples of how hard it is for us to hold tension, as in the tension of political viewpoints, left, right, and center. Well, tension holding does create stress, but in writing the book, I was intrigued to discover that there's an antonym to the word distress. So we talk a lot about how distressing tension is. But psychologists talk about eustress, E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S, eustress, which is the positive effect of tension. The tension that opens us up to new ways of looking at the world. The tension that opens our hearts to new levels of humanity and compassion. I'm, as you know from reading the book, I work a lot with this image of the human heart, by which I don't mean simply the seat of our emotions. If you go back to the root of the word heart, it comes from the Latin cor, C-O-R.

So it's that center place in the human self, C-O-R-E, where all of our faculties converge. Emotion, will, intellect, you know, ego in the positive sense, bodily knowledge, relational knowledge, problem-solving knowledge, etc. So we enter life circumstances, especially if we care about other people and about what's going on around us, we enter life circumstances that take us to something called heartbreak. It's a very common human phenomenon. But I've observed over 77 years of hanging out with myself and others that the human heart can break in at least two ways. It can shatter into a million pieces, and sometimes as it's in the process of shattering, it gets hurled at the ostensible source of its pain in the manner of a fragment grenade,

trying to do harm, to do damage to where that pain is coming from. That's one way for the heart to break. And we see a lot of that these days. But it's also possible for the heart to break not apart, but open into greater capacity. And if we look carefully at the microcosms of our lives, we'll see a lot of that too. At my age, I know a lot of people who have lost the dearest person in their lives to death. And their hearts are broken. They go into that long, deep, underground period of grieving and slowly, slowly emerge,

awakening to the surprising revelation that they have become larger people, more compassionate, more open, more understanding, more forgiving. Their hearts have grown bigger, not in spite spite of their loss but because of their loss. There's something about that kind of loss that actually makes life more precious and makes the people around you, the world around you, more precious as well. So one of the questions I like to think about on a daily basis is, how do I keep my heart supple enough that it can break open rather than apart when the big hits come? And that includes the political realm. That includes, you know, as much as I despise the Trump phenomenon and fear the fascist possibilities in it, to speak very frankly, I need to keep my heart open to the pain among we the people that Trump has tapped into. I think he's

tapped into it in a totally irresponsible, very dangerous, racist, misogynist way. But there is pain out there. There is real pain and fear in that base. In all of us, I mean, honestly, I think that there's some of that. And I really like in your book, you talk about how in both books, there's ways of finding common ground with people who seem to hold extremely different viewpoints. And the basic of it is to hear their story. Yeah, exactly. One of the things, as you know, that I talk about in the book is, just to make this very concrete, is a series of workshops that I'm aware of where people are brought together around very contentious issues, such as abortion.

And 25 people come into a room. Nobody knows up front who holds what position. And for most of the day, until the last hour or so, they are forbidden from announcing their position, but instead invited and coached to tell the personal story of whatever the experience was that led them to the position they hold. And they learn to craft these stories and tell these stories, which a lot of us don't know how to do. And then to tell them to each other one-on-one or in triads, small groups. Well, by the end of the day, when it starts to be revealed what people's positions are, something remarkable has happened. The human thing has happened. People have realized that the same story can lead two people to two quite different positions. People have realized even more fundamentally that the more you know about another person's story,

the less possible it is to despise or dislike or dismiss that person, no matter how different he or she may be from you politically, ideologically, or whatever. There's something about the human story that is not only appealing and attractive, there's something about the human story that is not only appealing and attractive, there's something about the human story that's universal, especially if it's what I like to call a soul story as opposed to an ego story. One thing I know for sure, we all know this, I think, in one way or another, is that if I want to connect with another person at a deep level, boasting about my successes isn't going to do the job. And frankly, it doesn't even do the job for me because I've learned more from my failures or my journeys in darkness than I have from my successes. When I succeed, I kind of pat myself on the back and think I've really got my act together.

And it's not until I fall on my face that, you know, I stay up until three in the morning trying to figure out how to get it right the next time. So what connects us is those broken places, to quote Leonard Cohen again, writes about. He not only wrote about the blizzard of the world, but he has that wonderful lyric in Anthem, I think is the name of the song, where he says, forget your perfect offering, ring the bells that still can ring. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. But it's also through those cracks that we connect with one another. So when you hear the human story in a workshop like this, where, you know, people are talking about an ideologically

contentious issue, you may not change your mind, but you re-forge the human bond. And one principle that's very, very important to me is that in the long run, it's more important to be in right relationship with each other than it is to be right. That doesn't mean that we have to give up on our beliefs about right. I don't want to do that. No one wants to do that. But what's right is a complicated subject, and if we're not in right relationship with one another, we can't hang in with the conversation long enough to make any progress on those complications at all. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think that is a good place for us to wrap up. I think I could probably do this for about three more hours with you, but we're near, we're past the end of the show.

So thanks so much, Parker, for coming on. As I said earlier, we'll have links to all of your personal Facebook page, the Courage and Renewal Center, all those different things at oneufeed.net slash Parker. We'll also have a download there. And I encourage people or just Google Parker J. Palmer and you will find all of your wonderful stuff there. So thanks again so much. I've got a lot out of your reading that I'm going to continue to think about and come back to, and I certainly want to explore more. Well, thank you, Eric. It's been a delight to be on with you, and just all good wishes with the good work you're doing. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Okay, bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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